The cayman that’s behind you
makes no noise before he kills.
He breaks your curious neck
with the flat of his five foot
bird-thin jaws
and drags you to a thatch of
half-sunk mangrove roots in
the rapids’ whirlpool path,
so hair and clothes drift off
the flesh, that roasts by turns
of its own weight in the heavy
wall of sun and steaming air.
A week, two weeks of eating
for its squirming, owl-eyed,
white and hungry young.
What’s left of you are what
the Anu call the ‘forest’s
necklaces’:
cracked spines and clutching
metacarpals, sodden, water-
logged, but still bleach-bright
in the blackest branches.

Richard Wirick has published his fiction, essays and journalism in Quarterly West, Northwest Review, Playboy, Another Chicago Magazine, Indiana Review and elsewhere. He is completing a collection of short stories, Fables of Rescue, and is co-founder and editor of the journal Transformation. Telegram Books recently published a collection of his prose poems, One Hundred Siberian Postcards, which grew out of his assignments in Ukraine and Siberia in 2003-5, and his adoption of a Siberian daughter. He practises law in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.

“When I was up
in the air I knew
that everything
in my life could still
be fixed except
what I’d just done.”

he said on the deck
of the Coast Guard boat,
all of the bones
of his doomed-to-go-
on-living body broken:
Twenty stories through
The same world’s new world’s air.
All around him all
That unmindfully
Buffered the void:

Great speckled gulls,
a cliff of trees,
acres and acres
of sparkling foam.

Richard Wirick has published his fiction, essays and journalism in Quarterly West, Northwest Review, Playboy, Another Chicago Magazine, Indiana Review and elsewhere. He is completing a collection of short stories, Fables of Rescue, and is co-founder and editor of the journal Transformation. Telegram Books recently published a collection of his prose poems, One Hundred Siberian Postcards, which grew out of his assignments in Ukraine and Siberia in 2003-5, and his adoption of a Siberian daughter. He practises law in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Looking up and down that stretch of sewer
Through which I’ve sluiced this wan, addictive life:
Cooking the books, obliterating tracks
Whooping up while no one else was watching,
Dull to my family all those after-days.
It’s all run backwards, all these rising pains
Culled and crafted chronically long ago;
Fits of cleansing, soon overwashed again
By numbing gulps of bitter eye-candy,
Those neon-cunning pornographic trails
I stalked, and when I could have bailed, instead
Chose fog and soundproofed walls for twelve long years.

Now, how to root the numbness out, and live?
Plow on–keep breathing–dredge your love to give.

Robbie Gamble is a nurse practitioner working with homeless families in the Boston area. His poetry has appeared recently in Acorn, Monkey’s Fist, Modern Haiku, and the 2005 Robert Frost Foundation Anthology.

Black walnut seedlings travel undercover,
Sneak up through the soil with two rounded leaves,
then, when the squirrels aren’t looking,
shoot out the serrated second leaf set, and
claim the territory.

A sixty-foot tree in an herb barrel? (Shove over, parsley.)
Three-foot diameter trunk wedged between the fence palings? (Give it a try.)
In the lawn? (The mower is old, it might miss.)
In the crevices of the rock wall? (Sideways could work)
In the parking strip under the power line. (The city pruners might forget our street)

The arborist advises me to photograph the leafing each season,
measure the mature leaf span,
watch for die-back.
“This scar,” he taps the puckered trunk,
“has self-healed.” He scratches his head and puts his cap back on.

Linera Lucas holds an MFA from Queens University of Charlotte. Her work has appeared in Pipes and Timbrels and Bede’s Journal and is forthcoming in the anthology In the Yard.

Photo Montage:  Watts Towers © by Masumi Hayashi

My husband was gone two weeks,
before his father tracked him
down, dragged him back to me,
afro crowned with lint, cheeks
sunken.  I ran him a bath, scrubbed
his body, his head, picked the lint out,
the way he picked at the carpet
when he thought I wasn’t looking.

Joy Beshears Hagy lives on High Rock Lake in Lexington, NC with her husband, two dogs and a cat. Hagy holds a BA from Salem College, and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. Her poetry has appeared in various journals including Poet’s Canvas, THRIFT, Main Street Rag and Southern Gothic Online. Her poem, “Rapture” was chosen by Kathryn Stripling Byer as Honorable Mention in the 2006 NC State Poetry Contest.

The workers bleached the walk, all afternoon
The motor sound of the pressure wash,
Chlorine.  The signposts were scrubbed.  The red
Brighter than ever.  A simple pensioner
I sacrificed myself to lesser colors: chartreuse,
Ambergris. The red had to go. I’m not
A moralist about this, not at all. No steel-rod
Constructions in my spine, I bend with the times
Still. I look at red and see ruins. My City. You
Can’t understand how packaged
The whole thing remains. How they talked for days
In dust free rooms. Dustless worlds, in fact.
They had none of it in their bodies.  They didn’t miss
It. They wore their gills proudly. The simians hunted
Them for sport. I had put options on both sides,
A straddle. I can’t tell you who won but the roads are much cleaner
Now. If you don’t mind all the water, the wipers
Constant flapping. They know me
On this corner.  I look good in this light.

Claudia Grinnell was born and raised in Germany. She now lives in Louisiana, where she
teaches at the University of Louisiana, Monroe. Professor Grinnell is the author of Conditions Horizontal (Missing Consonant Press, 2001). Her poems have appeared in such journals as Kenyon Review, Exquisite Corpse, New Orleans Review, Mudlark, and Minnesota Review. In 2005, Dr. Grinnell won the Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.

She loved English
on both sides of the ocean,
phrasing it with her whole body
and was something
for the boys to behold:
skinny skirt, ample skin,
dark cherry lips, spit curls.
I imagined a goldfish
swimming in the clear liquid
of her plastic high heels.
Red lacquered finger
pointing, she would
glare over us
as perspiration locked us
waiting for her finger to spark.
The high-water nerd
in white socks spoke up,
so eloquently energized.

Beebe Barksdale-Bruner has an MFA in poetry from Queens University and a forthcoming book from Press 53 in 2007.